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Transition Studies   67

round it. The Lord have mercy on us all, if we have to believe in such rubbish. F. Galton was there, and says it was a good seance   

Such as it was it led to a second smaller and more carefully organised one with Huxley present, who reported to Darwin."

That report is printed in Huxley's Life and Letters, Vol. ii, pp. 144-9. His conclusion was that the medium was V a cheat and an impostor." It produced the following letter from Darwin

Dowx, January 29 [1874]

MY DEAR HUXLEY.-It was very good of you to write so long an account. Though the seance did tire you so much it was, I think, really worth the exertion, as the same sort of things are done at all the seances, even at   's; and now to my mind an enormous weight of evidence would be requisite to make one believe in anything beyond mere trickery .... I am pleased to think that I declared to all my family, the day before yesterday, that the more I thought of all that I had heard happened at Queen Anne St, the more convinced I was it was all imposture... .My theory was that [the medium] managed to get the two men on each side of him to hold each other's hands instead of his, and that he was thus free to perform his antics. I am very glad that I issued my ukase to you to attend.

Yours affectionately, CHARLES DARWIN.

Probably Galton also saw Huxley's report and concurred in his judgment. At any rate he very soon became a despiser of `spiritualistic' seances.

Such are -the last traces I can find of Galton's investigations into spiritualism. Some thirty-five years later Galton knew that the present writer had been invited to attend a seance by one who had sought aid from spiritualism in what formed for different reasons a crisis in the lives of all three. From his few written words on that occasion I know that Galton must long and definitely have been convinced of the futility of any light reaching. human affairs from that strange medley of self-deception, chicanery and credulity which passes under the name of spiritualism. But I have no clue to the events or mental processes by which his attitude passed from the stage of agnosticism to that of complete rejection.

I have already indicated elsewhere that Galton was young till his death. Even between forty and fifty he was a boy who must try his powers on all things- that came his way; it is true that he had had for some years experience of editing the Royal Geographical Society's Journal, but in 1865, amid all his other projects and work, Galton took upon his shoulders a very considerable share of the editorial duties of a weekly journal-The Reader. Galton himself says it was an amusing experience, and indicates that the loss of the guaranteed £100 was more than compensated by the gain of an unexpected view of the seamy side of journalistic enterprise'. The attempt was a .brave one, and one of the committee of three, Spencer, Galton and Lockyer, which was appointed to make-the preliminary arrangements, very shortly after made a marked success with a somewhat similar journal-Nature.

The Reader had been established in January 1863 as a journal .of Litera= ture - Science and Art and when purchased towards the end of 1864, the programme of its future aims was propounded as follows

"The very. inadequate manner in which the progresa of Science and the_ labour and opinions 1 Memories, pp. 167-8...

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